ACT 1: SCENE 4
Nettlewart sat with her staff in the growing darkness of her unlit kitchen and laughed. A good, solid, Wicked Witch's laugh. The kind she remembered from... a long time ago. She thought back to her little bed in the attic, hearing that laugh, those screams, those sobs making the laugh rise more and more majestically. The door opening in the middle of the night and the spiky, tall woman in black lugging a massive sack into her room.
"You cold?"
"Mm" says the little girl.
"I got this for you to stuff your sheets with."
Opening the sack, and pulling out reams and reams of sweet smelling, blonde hair.
"You cut off that lady's hair, Mum?"
The shaft of moonlight bouncing off the golden tresses onto the bloodied poker in the woman's hand.
"That's not all I did, dear Nettie!"
And then that laugh.
She could truly laugh it now. She stroked the staff and felt the warm blood pour down her mother's hand.
"The trap's set, Boy."
"Oh?" The Boy took a taper from the fire and began lighting the kitchen's many candles.
"Oh yes. They're deep in the woods now, and the sun's all but set. It'll take a little magic to get them thoroughly disorientated, they'll get cold, lonely and hungry and then they'll come across a house made entirely out of gingerbread. So they'll eat. They'll eat for a while before they're disturbed by the two strangers who live in the house. And they'll feel so very bad for eating these people's house and will they be very angry with them? But no, the strangers will be understanding and kind to the poor waifs. They'll invite them in to get warm and then, Bam!"
"You'll blow them up?"
Nettlewart winced. "No. We'll cook them and eat them."
"Oh. Why does that go 'Bam'?"
"It's a good job I'm in a good mood tonight, Boy. I won't put up with your insolence. Not any more."
"Right you are." The Boy kept his tone as disinterested as possible, but she saw that his hand was shaking as he blew out the taper.
"Now be quiet and let me concentrate." Nettlewart went back to caressing the staff, feeling the hot stickiness of long shed blood. "They're coming."
The Western Woods seemed colder than any of the other forests surrounding Pantoland. Gretel usually loved the woods - walking, watching Hansel climb trees, picking flowers, getting "lost", waiting to be rescued, giving up and going home - but she was uneasy here. Getting her bearings was more difficult than usual, and worsened once the sun had finally set. The tree tops were so thick above her head that she couldn't make out any stars at all, and shadows streamed from the trees in every direction. Birdsong came in fits and starts, half the time a deafening racket, half the time eerie silence. There were far too many straight lines and jagged corners for anything natural to have. It was as though the forest was a reflection in a smashed mirror. She shivered and drew her shawl tighter around her.
"This place gives me the creeps."
"Me too." Hansel was walking a little way ahead with a lantern, checking for the so-far elusive mushrooms. "Let's go back."
"No, Hansel. We said we'd do this for Mum so let's do it properly. We've come this far."
Hansel scowled at a particularly shifty looking fern. "I can't believe she talked us into doing this."
"Hansel, we've discussed this before.... Ah-ha!"
Gretel bent over and tugged at something resembling the three-inch high red and white spotted fungi her mother had described. It hissed viciously and scurried into the undergrowth. Gretel shrieked slightly and started back into Hansel, who watched the trail disappear into the shadows.
"That was bizarre."
"That was more than bizarre" said Gretel, wiping the hand that had touched the mushroom creature on her pinafore, "but as I was saying, we've said we'll do this for Mum because... because it's the least she'd do for us."
"You think she'd go alone into a haunted forest in the middle of the night for us?"
"She's starved for us, hasn't she? She sweated and toiled alone for nineteen years to keep a roof over our head and food on our table?"
"Not much food," muttered Hansel grumpily.
"But there'd be more for her if she didn't have to share it with us."
Hansel stopped and turned the lamp on his sister.
"What do you mean 'if she didn't have to share it with us'?"
Gretel paused for a moment, uncomfortable in the spotlight, as though she were being... watched.
"Well, you've heard the stories," she replied at last, "of kids that were illegitimate or their parents were too poor to look after them any more. After the King had died and before they put the fence up. They'd get taken for walks or picnics in these woods and they'd be... lost. And once they were lost they'd never come back. People even gave up sending out search parties here in the end. They never found them. And sometimes people would come back from search parties, well... wrong."
"Wrong? How?"
"Just wrong. And they'd never ever say what happened. They'd usually die soon after they'd been turned wrong. Suicides, or mysterious circumstances."
"So then they put the fence up."
Gretel nodded.
"And coming here became outlawed. But that happened a couple of years after Dad... you know. The country was in turmoil, Mum was destitute. It would have been easy for her to have just left us here."
"Gretel, the country's still in turmoil, Mum's still destitute and we're here anyway."
Hansel turned the lamp away from Gretel and back to the undergrowth.
"Yes, well I think we're old enough to take care of ourselves now, don't you Hansel?" said Gretel, blinking hard in the sudden darkness. "Besides, Mum seemed very sure that everything would be OK. Almost as if she knew something we didn't."
"However," retorted Hansel, "I hardly think that this counts as twilight any more."
Gretel continued to blink as her eyes completely refused to adjust themselves. There was absolutely no green to be seen any more, just shades of darkness and the beam of the lantern. She sighed.
"I suppose you're right. Mum was very adamant that these blessed mushrooms got picked at dusk and I think that this is quite definitely night. We'll just have to come again tomorrow. Come on."
Gretel turned on her heels and staggered forwards in the blackness. Fighting against overhanging branches and tripping over roots she forged ahead several feet before she realised that her brother and his lantern weren't behind her. Still pushing forward she craned over her shoulder to see him. No sign. She stopped walking. There was no sound of his bulky frame groping through the trees - no footfall of twigs, no tunic brushing against bracken, no complaints of fatigue or sudden bursts of swearing.
"Hansel?" called Gretel. "Hansel!"
"Yes?" enquired a voice very near to hers.
Gretel yelped and span around. Hansel was standing right in front of her. She counted to ten.
"Where did you go?"
"I didn't go anywhere," replied Hansel, "you've just walked right round in a circle. It was very funny."
"Well I wouldn't have walked right round in a circle if you'd have been here with that light."
"And I wouldn't have been able to watch you walk round in a circle like a spoid if I didn't have the light with me."
"Hansel?"
"What?"
There was the almost inaudible sound of a male nipple being twisted 180 degrees.
"Ow!"
"Now come with me and let's get out of here."
Hansel rubbed the feeling back into his left nipple and glared at his sister.
"How are we going to get out of here, Gretel? Everything looks the same, even by lamplight."
"It does not."
"Oh yeah?" Hansel swung the torch about. "What's this? A bunch of creepy dark trees." He swung the light to face the opposite direction. "And what's this? Um, a bunch of creepy dark trees. And what's this?.... Oh."
Hansel peered into the gloom that his lamp had only partially lit up. In front of him now wasn't a bunch of creepy dark trees, but a pathway of sorts that seemed to lead into a clearing. A clearing with little orange lights shining at distinctly window shaped intervals.
"Do you see that?"
"Come on Hansel."
"What do you suppose it is?"
"Hansel. Come on. We have to get home."
"I think it's a house. We could get help."
Hansel started off towards the dancing orange lights, but felt a forceful little hand suddenly dig into his arm.
"No. We have to get home. I knew this would happen..."
"If you knew this would happen then why are we so lost?" He shook her hand from him. "Face it. We're alone in the dark, abandoned, outlawed, haunted woods and we are well and truly lost and I don't hear galloping hooves or the chink of shiny armour so I think it's probably safe to say that your bloody precious Prince Charming isn't on his way to rescue us. So let's just bite the bullet and see if there's anybody over there who can help us out, shall we?"
"Hansel, what sort of help do you think we'd get from anybody who lives in the middle of the dark, abandoned, outlawed, haunted woods?"
Hansel stared wide eyed at her for a moment, then gazed back into the clearing.
"It'll be all right." There was something odd, something all too calm about his voice. Gretel grabbed her brother's arm again when he began to walk back towards the lights.
"Hansel, stop. I know how we can get out of here."
Hansel kept on walking, tugging Gretel with him.
"As I was saying, I knew this would probably happen, so I planned ahead..." She winced as he dragged her through a nettle. "I put little stones in my basket before we left. The little pearly ones that line the road to the palace, you know? You don't get them anywhere else, they're all shiny." Hansel began to slow down. "And I dropped one every few feet or so from the fence onwards. I made a little path." Hansel stopped completely and looked at his sister, unsure. "But I need your lamplight to show them up. Look."
Gretel gently took her brother's large hand and guided the lamp towards the ground behind them. Like a dozen little eyes blinking open, a wonky line of white pebbles lit up across the forest floor. Hansel's jaw dropped momentarily, before forming an immense grin.
"Well I'll be. So you're not as stupid as you look."
Gretel picked up the first pebble and, putting it back in her basket, jogged over to pick up the second. She turned in the torchlight to smile at her brother.
"Well, come on, then."
The Boy sat at the window in silence and watched the lamplight make its erratic but certain way back towards the town. He continued to watch where the light had been long after it had faded away, sitting quiet and still, all too aware of the growing aura of noiseless rage in the chair behind him.
"So they're gone," he said, helpfully, at last.
"Yes."
He continued to look out of the window.
"What do you suppose went wrong?"
Nettlewart ran her hands over the staff but the blood had dried. She couldn't feel it any more. Only the sting of its electricity. She reached beside her and picked up a candle. She gently blew at the flame. Every candle in the cottage blinked out as one. There was a blackness, sudden and as thick as its accompanying silence. The thin swirling tendrils of white smoke and four bright, painful eyes flashed occasionally in the more violent sparks that emanated from the staff. The Boy kept on looking out of the window in the darkness as the electric crackling grew and grew.
He wasn't going to cry.
He was not going to cry.